Private jet is a reason to pay close attention to management and listen to the various employee sites, but not a reason not to buy.

A great company will do well, even if the management is not perfect.

What to watch is growth of their sector, penetration into the addressable market, there market position and any competitive advantage. If you are the leader in a growing market with low penetration, a jet here or there won't harm the business. What does the harm is when you lose leadership. Ask the investors in Research in Motion, Motorola or Nokia.

The price (interest rate) of which is tightly controlled by a private sector organisation which has been awarded a monopoly by the Federal Government which also happens to be the biggest customer (borrower) and with which it closely colludes.

It sounds like he knows enough about marketing to do more of what works.

I will always believe that those who are most successful selling financial services understand marketing better than investing. This is why all over the world most money managers fail to beat their indexes over a 10 year period, but continue to get paid.

The Crash Of Oil Prices Could Be The Opportunity Of The Decade [View article]

The future is not only unknown, but unknowable. Only the odds can sometimes be known.

Giant companies go bust all the time PanAm, Enron, AT&T, GM to name just a few.

The stock market is a forward looking discounting machine, not a backward looking one. Dividends yields and PEs are based on what has happened in the past, not what will happen in the future. The key to calculating the odds is always an understanding of the drivers.

Oil prices are extremely volatile, always have been and probably always will be. This is because it is a commodity where out of the thousands of buyers and thousands of sellers none have a sufficiently strong market power to stabilise prices (OPEC as a producers union has had mixed and normally short term success in doing this) and storage capacity is a small fraction of monthly demand.

As far as energy is concerned the combination of coal, natural gas and uranium account for the lion share of electricity production and increasingly there share of transportation fuel will increase as the number of electric vehicles increases. As a percentage of global energy supply, oil is on the decline.

No doubt the high cost of much of the oil production that came on stream over the past 5 to 10 years, will create a floor for the market. However, note that even when prices dip below $60 it will take over 3 months to see meaningful amounts of this production shut in. So one would better view this as a long term floor (i.e. where prices are unlikely to REMAIN below for a sustained period, not where prices will not go - ask investors in natural gas).

However, what is important here is that MARGIN COMPRESSION is most likely to hit the industry. Certainly over the next quarter, likely over the next 4 quarters and possibly for longer than that.

No doubt for Exxon and Chevron, compression in upstream margins will be compensated for by improvements in margins in their downstream refining, distribution and chemicals businesses. And I haven't looked closely enough at their businesses to evaluate the ratio's.

But if I were looking at buying a bottom this is where I would focus. I would also wait for oil prices to stabilise rather than trying to predict where they will stabilise (or at least if I was trying to predict I would keep my bet size small because it truly is a high risk high reward gamble).

For most of my life I didn't believe I was gambling and certainly didn't play casino games.

However, late in life, it was brought to my attention that most of the more successful business people and investors (read Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Getty, Carnegie, etc.) are strong card players. And that success in investing (and business) is as much about understanding how to manage risk as it is about trying to pick the best stocks/investments.

You described in your article your 'system' of stock investing, which if you implement it fairly rigorously then it gives you a positive edge (I haven't tested it and I'm taking your word for it and it does make sense to me as well).

How much you make off your system will now depend on how much you 'bet' on each company. Of course how much you 'should' bet is determined by a specific mathematical relationship Kelly's Criterion, which is borrowed directly from casino gambling (risk of ruin).

It may surprise you that investing is more similar to gambling than many investor realise and that learning the principles of successful gambling makes you an immensely better investor. I have no doubt that Warren Buffet would not be as successful as he has been if he were not such a good poker and bridge player.

Yes, this is what I said, the outcome on any individual stock investment cannot be known in advance or to a high level of certainty.

The outcome of an investment into 20 stocks that are selected based on the same characteristics can be known to a high probability.

This is why it is very difficult for investors to succeed if they do not take a systematic approach. It is like the casino operator, who has a 5% edge in the game of roulette. You cannot tell the outcome of any spin, but if you make enough bets you can know (as a Casino operator) that you will capture 5% of the amount bet on the table.

Your stockbroker will happily spin for you between 9.30am and 4pm, for a small commission, you must have a positive expectancy system if you want casino like profits and no system if you want to be the punter.

Buying stocks is more science than art. You can never know the outcome of any single individual stock investment, but by following a systematic approach you can tell within 95% probability what the result will be over the long term, from buying a basket of stocks that have the same quality, growth and valuation characteristics.

Its all noise. CRTO is a volatile stock and will likely trade between 28 and 40 depending on rumours and market sentiment, until there is new information that will take it over 50 or lack or back down to 25. My bet is that it will go up to 60

With any high growth company such as Criteo, you should focus more on forward earnings (and of course whether or not it can beat it). Its forward PE is 41 and it grew its revenues by 60% in the June quarter and its earnings of 4 cents compare to negative 12 cents in the same period year ago.

The companies guidance issued 5 August is for similar growth in the September quarter.

As far as growth companies are compared Criteo is undervalued by up to 50% (a PEG of 1.0 would be fair).

On the negative side, the company is investing heavily in expanding its sales and marketing capability, if this does not result in even more growth, then it will begin to struggle to meet earnings growth by Q3 2015.